Episode 334 - Your Humanity Is Your Brand with Jeniffer Thompson
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Jeniffer Thompson discusses YOUR HUMANITY IS YOUR BRAND, including how AI search actually rewards the content you’ve already created, the SEO fundamentals that still matter including the KDP keyword trick most authors miss, why your brand is your promise and not your logo, how to choose platforms based on your emotional bandwidth rather than what everyone else says you should do, and why the most discoverable thing about you is your humanity.
Jeniffer Thompson is an author branding coach, book marketing strategist, and publishing consultant who helps authors clarify their message and build sustainable visibility. She co-founded Monkey C Media in 2004, an award-winning book cover and website design studio, and hosts The Premise podcast. Jeniffer is also a co-founder of the San Diego Writers Festival and a founding member of the International Memoir Writers Association.
Episode Links
https://www.instagram.com/jeniffer_grace/
https://www.facebook.com/jenifferthompsonconsulting
https://www.thepremisepod.com/
Referenced in outro:
Episode 229 - How to Make Your Work Accessible with Michael Johnson
Summary & Transcript
Jeniffer Thompson is an author branding coach, book marketing strategist, and publishing consultant who helps authors clarify their message and build sustainable visibility. She co-founded Monkey C Media in 2004, an award-winning book cover and website design studio, and hosts The Premise podcast. In this conversation, Jeniffer explored how AI is reshaping search and discoverability for authors—and why the most effective response is not to become more machine-friendly but to lean harder into what makes you human.
HOW AI CHANGED THE SEARCH LANDSCAPE
Jeniffer described her initial fear that AI-generated search results would bury her work. The opposite happened. Because she had spent years building a library of blog posts and articles about publishing, AI crawlers identified her as an expert and began surfacing her as one of the top publishing consultants in the country—a result that traditional search had never delivered so directly. The takeaway for authors: if you have been creating content in your area of expertise, that body of work is now more valuable than ever, because AI does not just list links—it synthesizes authority and presents answers.
SEO FUNDAMENTALS THAT STILL MATTER
Jeniffer walked through the technical basics that remain important even as AI changes how search results are delivered. Incoming links and anchor text still signal relevance. Image file names should include your name and keywords rather than the default string from your camera. Alt text—originally designed for screen readers serving visually impaired users—is now ingested by AI and search engines as part of a site’s relevance profile. And transcripts of audio and video content add another layer of indexable data. Matty noted that she had only recently begun publishing podcast transcripts, now that Descript and Claude had made the process feasible, and Jeniffer confirmed that transcripts are one of the most effective low-effort ways to boost discoverability.
Jeniffer also offered a practical tip about Amazon’s keyword fields in KDP: most authors enter a single word in each of the seven keyword slots, but each slot allows up to fifty characters. Using that full space—and ensuring the keywords align with your chosen categories and appear in your title and description—gives Amazon more data to work with when placing your book.
AUTHOR BRANDING IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK
Jeniffer described the resistance she encountered when she first started teaching author branding in the mid-2000s. Conference organizers told her no one would know what the term meant. Authors recoiled at the idea of having a “brand,” associating it with Nike logos rather than reader relationships. She reframed it: your brand is your promise. Why did you write this book, who is it for, and how will it help them? If you can communicate that in a way that is joyful and sustainable for you and exciting for the reader who needs you most, that is your brand.
She described a pattern she saw repeatedly in her early years at Monkey C Media: they would build an author a beautiful website and other brand assets, hand over the keys, and the author would park the car in the garage and never drive it. The missing piece was not the asset but the understanding that visibility is built on relationship, not on having a nice website. The number one thing that sells your first book, Jeniffer said, is really your third book—because by then you have developed a brand, built reader relationships, and connected the dots between your platform and your work.
PLATFORM, BANDWIDTH, AND CHOOSING YOUR CHANNEL
Jeniffer pushed back on the common advice that authors must be on every platform. Her approach starts with three questions: What is your budget? How much time do you have? And what is your emotional bandwidth? If a platform drains you, it is not sustainable, and unsustainable marketing produces nothing useful. She described a client who hated video and panels but loved writing long-form articles—so they built her platform around Substack rather than TikTok. Jeniffer’s framework centers on three pillars: audience, content, and loyalty. Figure out who your audience is, create content they are looking for, and keep them loyal.
Matty added that AI may be accelerating a shift toward deeper, longer-form content. She noted that she is spending less time scrolling Facebook—in part because AI-generated content is making the feed less interesting—and more time on platforms like Substack where the interaction is more intentional. AI search, she observed, never points users to a TikTok video; it points them to articles and substantive content. That may be heartening for authors who love writing but dread making short-form video.
STEPPING PAST THE THRESHOLD
Jeniffer encouraged authors to push just past the edge of their comfort zone—not into territory that gives you hives, but one step beyond what feels safe. She spoke from experience as a rock climber who is terrified of heights and shared the story of an author client who insisted she would never do a podcast, tried it at Jeniffer’s encouragement, turned out to be a natural on a morning radio show, and eventually started her own podcast. The magic, Jeniffer said, lives just past the threshold.
LEAN INTO YOUR HUMANITY
The conversation closed on the idea that became the episode’s title. Matty observed that she enjoys cute puppy videos as much as anyone, but if the puppy is AI-generated, she is not interested—and that instinct is a signal about where discoverability is heading. Jeniffer agreed: AI can help you get found, but only your humanity can make someone stay. Your voice, your story, your willingness to be real—that is the thing no algorithm can replicate and no shortcut can replace. Lean into your humanity, Jeniffer said. Own it.
This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Jeniffer Thompson. Hey, Jeniffer, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Jeniffer: Hi, Matty. Good to be here.
[00:00:07] Matty: It is lovely to have you here and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you. Jeniffer Thompson is an author, branding coach, book marketing strategist and publishing consultant who helps authors clarify their message and build sustainable visibility. She co-founded Monkey C Media in 2004, an award-winning book cover and website design studio, and hosts the
Jeniffer’s also a co-founder of the San Diego Writers Festival and a founding member of the International Memoir Writers Association. And so specifically, SEO AI search and long-term visibility. And I think this is one of these topics that on the surface sounds like, oh, yeah, SEO sure, we all know about that.
But, I imagine that AI is changing the, complexion of, search these days. So why don’t we start out, just give us a little bit of background about. What is different about search now than might’ve been the case a couple of years ago, or even a couple of months ago, maybe?
[00:01:04] Jeniffer: Absolutely, and it is changing almost daily. And interestingly, you know. Search engine optimization has always been about relevant content, right? Content is king, has been my mantra since well before 2004, and it’s still the case when AI came on the scene and results were changing from here are your results and your options, you know, most relevant.
To click on to, here’s the answer you’re looking for. That scared me. I thought, oh no, you know, we’re not going to come up in search engines. So I really recalibrated, you know, how I was thinking about search, but then something really interesting happened. I started getting more leads and more phone calls because I’d done such a good job with my SEO in the past by having blogs and relevant content, frequent content, those articles were making up the bulk of my expertise in the AI world of search engine results, right?
So now I was being presented as one of the top publishing consultants in the country, specifically one of the top female publishing consultants in the country. That wasn’t happening before. I mean, sure I came up in results, but people had to look at it, make a decision, potentially read all of my articles for 20 years to figure out who I was, and instead, AI’s like, oh, this person is an expert and here are the highlights.
It helped me. So I was like, okay. And my brain was like, this is actually amazing. We still need to create great content. We still need all of the metadata, and we can talk about all that boring stuff. , because I think it’s important to know how these things work. But really, if you are creating lots of content in your area of expertise, talking about the thing you’re passionate about, you’re more likely to get discovered if you have that bulk of content, if you’ve already started in the past, and that’s kind of a cool thing, right?
[00:03:01] Matty: It does feel like, what I keep hoping will happen with metadata, and I’m sure this is on the way, is that at some point there will be some point where we don’t have to go onto like Amazon KDP and enter our keywords. We have entered our, we’ve provided the manuscript. Some machine could figure out what the right keywords
I actually thought we’d be further along in this than we are yet that a lot of these platforms would just stop asking the authors to provide this stuff because I really think that authors are not like data analysts, and so I know I’m very bad at picking my own keywords. I think that’s probably common among other people, and I would think the
AI search that maybe the benefit is, and I think this is kind of what you’re saying, that we don’t have to think about, like put on the machine hat and try to guess what a machine’s going to think we’re, we can say what’s going to be appealing to the people that we want to reach. And if we’re writing for that audience, then the AI is going to absorb
[00:04:03] Jeniffer: Exactly, and the more content you have, the more relevant you are deemed. And you know, incoming links are still important because that shows someone cares enough to link to your website anchor text. Still matters, you know, the hyperlink, because that gives a little bit more information, more metadata to the search
Why are you linking to this site? You know, so the anchor text is still important. Like all those, all those elements of traditional SEO are still really important. But I want to go back to what you just said because I think it makes authors really nervous as it should to ingest our manuscripts into ai because our content is being stolen and it is
People can say, I want to write, you know, a book in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Jeniffer Thompson if they have my books, right? And so, you know, we’re still not sure. It’s kind of shaky ground, like authors are not sure what to trust and what not to trust. So in that way I, I don’t know that I would recommend putting your manuscript into ai, but I will say Amazon has really changed the way that they’re categorizing books and it’s based on, you know, those key words, which, by the way, most people put a word in those seven spaces and KDP, when really you
You know, take advantage of all 50 characters so you can squeeze in some more data and then make sure those keywords are related to the three book categories you chose and the three Kindle categories you chose. Because if there’s crossover, that gives you more relevance in that space for those, and even better if it’s in your book title and in your
If Amazon’s going to look at that and go, oh, well this is clearly what this is about. We’re going to put it in this category. And you know, we choose our categories, but then Amazon does what they want, so.
[00:05:52] Matty: it would be moving more toward, they just do what they want and within parameters. I’m fine with that. And I definitely agree, like I never recommend people feed their manuscripts to AI unless they feel comfortable. I mean, I do that. I’ve thought it through. I’ve decided that it’s worth it to me to provide it in
But there are organizations we’re providing our manuscripts to like Amazon or Draft2Digital or IngramSpark that, that they have it and I do feel like they have it anyway, and that, that. they are in the, a
[00:06:25] Jeniffer: That’s absolutely true. I totally agree. And you know what’s funny, actually, Matty, I put my books into AI too. I’ve made a decision for me because. All of my content is out there, it’s all free, it’s all over the internet. My book is just another version of my content, so I make that choice. but you know, authors are really nervous about that, but you’re absolutely right.
So in KDP you upload your ebook and then it can spit out your relevant keywords. That would make way more sense than us lay people having to guess what are my best seven key words, you know, what are people really searching for? And that’s the thing. And that’s where things like Publisher Rocket come into play to help us, you know?
Do an analysis of what’s actually happening out there with our readers.
[00:07:08] Matty: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:07:10] Matty: So um, there were two questions I had based on that. One is that I can’t even remember what the conversation was. It was a recent episode and whoever I was speaking with, it might have been even after I turned off the recorded button. Was the idea that a benefit of having your content on a bunch of different platforms is that.
AI is more likely to favor content. And by content, I mean like a book that’s showing up on multiple retail platforms, not just content that’s being spit out on different, you know, substack or something
[00:07:44] Jeniffer: Sure. Sure. Yeah.
[00:07:45] Matty: That, that, that’s a benefit. Do you have a sense of that? is going wide beyond Amazon going to be a benefit in the AI world beyond the benefits it might have now or would’ve had in the
[00:07:58] Jeniffer: I don’t have any. Data on that. I have an opinion on it, but I don’t, I don’t know if I’m right. You know, duplicate content is something we have to be careful with. so typically when a search engine scans for content, there’ll be the top level where it appeared first is what gets indexed and everything else gets ignored.
So I’m not. Sure about that. But I will say this, if those sites link back to you and mention you, the more you’re mentioned obviously on the internet, the more relevant you’re going to be deemed. So I would say yes, absolutely. Plus you just want to sell in more places than Amazon.
[00:08:33] Matty: The, um, the other question I always have is I’m always going back and forth on transcripts. I finally got to a point where thanks to Descript and Claude, I can produce a transcript of
I went for years trying to do that, and it just wasn’t, it wasn’t feasible because the transcripts that were spit out by the AI that was available to me were just not publishable. And I finally got the, got to the point, it got to the point where it was publishable. And so I’m now, providing transcripts and I know some of my, followers do like to
I’m assuming thatthat even if the audio is available somewhere, does. Publishing a transcript, you have a sense of whether that’s still
[00:09:18] Jeniffer: A hundred percent, absolutely. Transcripts are a great idea. Any place you can add more data, the better. You know when we talk about images or videos, if you can have a image description, tag a title, tag, a transcript, even captions help optimize your content for the better. You know, alt tags are, they’re actually
[00:09:41] Jeniffer: do you want me to talk about alt text while
[00:09:42] Matty: Yeah, that would be great. no, that would be
[00:09:45] Jeniffer: I’ll talk about images in general because people discount the power of images on your website or on any of your social platforms. And so the name that you give an image is really important because it becomes part of the URL, it becomes part of the
So a lot of times people will send me a picture of themselves for the premise podcast, right? And it’ll be DSXH three, four, whatever, right? All, all the numbers that came out of the Canon camera or whatever. If you rename that Jeniffer Thompson author, whatever, a couple key, you know, the keyword jpeg. Now I am associated with that image.
So if you do a search for me online, my images actually come up. Because Google and AI knows what that is. And the other opportunity there, I said captions, image descriptions, but alt text. Alt text is what is read to a blind person who is using a reader like Jaws who can’t see the screen, but the screen is being read to him when he, so I have a client who I’ve experienced it with him, he’s blind.
And as he’s going through a website, he sees button, button, button, button. Picture or, you know, no one bothered to describe what these things are. All of that information gets ingested into AI and into search engines and becomes part of the relevant data. What is this website about? Who, what is this? So not only is it a kind thing to do for people who are visually impaired, but it’s really helpful for SEO.
So whenever you send in your author photo, which I’m, you know, most authors will be on panels and they’ll appear and have guest posts, and they send in their author photo. Have you optimized that photo in all
[00:11:30] Matty: I wanted to step back for a little context and talk more generally about author branding because you have a perspective as well on this idea of strategic discoverability and how it ties to
[00:11:43] Jeniffer: I can’t get more excited about a topic than author branding. You know, when we first started our company, we really served authors with websites, book covers, business cards, headshots, assets, really, and I found. It felt like we were building a brand new car and handing authors, you know, the keys to their brand new car, they’d pull it into the garage, kill the engine, shut the door, and
And I was like, why? What is happening? Why won’t people drive the car? And I realized, , because they didn’t realize that the power they hold is really in who they are and their relationship with their readers and the visibility that they can get. So. Branding, that’s the missing piece was the author branding, and I started to realize I needed to teach
We’re not selling your book, we’re selling you. You know, the number one thing that sells your first book. It is really your third book because you’ve developed a brand and you’ve developed a relationship with your readers, and you’re connecting the dots. Your bio includes all the accolades and the awards, and it’s more impressive.
Your credibility is like a foundation. It’s building on itself, right. And if people are not thinking in those terms of who am I and what do I offer, they don’t know to connect those dots. So I really made it my mission in around 2007 to teach people author, branding. And at the time, people looked at me and said, what are you talking about?
The. Conference organizers were like, no one will know what that is. Like, it was just almost like pulling teeth to get people to let me talk about this to authors. So I sort of reframed it and said, okay, this is just book marketing really. You know, author branding is a combination of author platform and book marketing and you know, that’s author
You’ve got your platform, your visibility, your credibility, your authority, but also your relationship building and your networking and you know, how are you going to draw people in, get them interested. And get them to take action. You know, what do you want them to actually do once they discover you? And frankly, the answer, the worst answer is buy
Because people don’t buy on the first time, right? So if you can get them to invest in you and what you have to offer, you’re more likely to sell to them down the line, you know, and website. Really for so long and even now are still online brochures, you know, they’re just static
And, you know, the bio, I wrote a book about how to write a bio because I think it’s one of the most critical pieces and people don’t up update, update their bio or know where their bio is online. Right. So you have your bio in 12 different places, but six of ’em are like five years old, and you don’t even offer that service anymore, and you’ve
You know, so like connecting the dots of your brand and your success can
[00:14:31] Matty: someday. I’m going to think of a palatable way to offer this, and it is how to create the giant spreadsheet of publishing information because I do have a giant spreadsheet of publishing information. In one of the tabs is Author bio, a photo, and it’s a list
So when I get a new hairstyle or whatever, I know where to go to fix the
[00:14:50] Jeniffer: That is brilliant.
[00:14:51] Matty: but nobody wants to, nobody’s going to go to a class called like Giant Excel spreadsheets for authors. But someday I’m going to think of the right positioning for it. And I do like the idea, I think that the idea of discoverability, like you would never talk to an author and say, do you want to be discoverable?
And have them say no,
[00:15:10] Jeniffer: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:11] Matty: where? Like you get over as I think that, that you are expressing, you get over that hesitance of people like branding. I’m a brand that feels uncomfortable, but discoverability is a much
[00:15:24] Jeniffer: A hundred percent. It really is how we frame it too. And you know, people think of a brand as Nike and Starbucks, but if you look beyond the logo of Nike and Starbucks, like what’s the thing that brings us into a Starbucks? It’s not the logo, right? It’s the promise. And so I try and. I try and bench it like, what is your
Like, why did you write this book? who is it for? And how is it going to help them? What is your promise? How can we communicate that in a way that’s joyful for you, sustainable for you, and exciting for the person who needs you most? And that’s the thing about. Working with authors that I’ve discovered is the first thing they say is like, well, who am
You know? Like it almost feels like I’m too humble to even pretend like I should have a brand. And I’m like, you wrote this book for a reason. There are people out there who need this book who are looking for this book, and if we don’t communicate what that is, that promise, they’re
And then people are like, oh. Right. Okay. It’s not about being full of yourself, it’s about being smart, about how you communicate your messaging with you, the people who are actually looking for you.
[00:16:37] Matty: Yeah.
[00:16:50] Matty: When you’re thinking about author branding and then specifically thinking about the changes that AI is bringing in terms of how people find the author brand, the branded authors that are going to be, the right match for them, do you have advice there? Like what is the overlap between author branding and the evolving nature of
[00:16:59] Jeniffer: Well, I think the messaging needs to be clear. And even my own website, well, mostly my own site, let me be clear. I’m terrible about branding myself. You know, I go in and I look at my website after three months and I’m like, wow, you know, this could be worded so much better. And I’m learning things every single
About my own goals, about where I want to go. So checking in with our message and making sure it’s clear is so important. But also, I think the number one mistake authors make with their website is it’s a, like I said, an online brochure. Listen, your website and your bio really
What do you have to offer them? What do they need to know? You know? So by following a formula of, you know, the hook, the promise, how they’re going to, how you’re going to deliver on that, and what they’re going to get, if you can remember that formula, it’s going to help you write better copy. And when search engines land on a website, they search in a
They look at headlines, they look at subheads, they look at short sentences. If you have a really long body of copy, search engines won’t finish it. They won’t index that content, they’ll actually back out. It’s too much because they know readers aren’t going to read it either,
Think, let’s think of a newspaper, right? You have a masthead, you have a title, and then you’ve got short, digestible paragraphs. Developing short digestible paragraphs on your website is going to help you immensely in getting discovered by search engines and then of course, by humans, but also more and more subheads.
So if you look at my blog, I find it irritating when someone tells me what they’re going to tell me. But it works. Search engines and humans read the just the subheads, and then they decide from those subheads, do I want to read the rest of this paragraph? Maybe I don’t need to. I’ve
You know, we read headlines in our culture because everything’s moving so fast. So to sort of recap, make sure your messaging is on point and it’s up to date, and make sure it’s digestible and it has a hierarchy as opposed to a really big block of copy. I still see. Self-published books that have a massive block of one paragraph of text on the back of a book, and you turn it over and you’re like, whoa.
Like I, I don’t have time to read this. Right? it’s not hooky. It’s not grabbing my attention. And so it’s true for your book cover is true for your website. It’s true for, I mean, look at Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook. You have a tiny little intro bio about you at the top. For
So, you know, analyzing and checking in with your content is critical. And I have a maintenance checklist that all my clients use and is available on my website.That says, do these things, check your bio, make sure you know where it is online, have that spreadsheet and go in and
Is it still relevant to what you want to accomplish for your goals?
[00:20:01] Matty: Yeah.
[00:20:05] Matty: One of the reasons that I’ve made the decision to feed my, published books into. AI and honestly, even my unpublished books, I use AI to like help find continuity issues and things like that. And, it’s worth it to me. It’s interesting because when the whole philanthropic case came up, I went and all my books were on the pirated list and unfortunately I hadn’t registered any of them, so I
and I wasn’t surprised to see that , because I just assumed all my. All my books, I assume everybody’s books are going to be pirated at some point. It’s not worth it to me, and in general, I advise other people it’s not worth it to them to try to track that down. But one of the things that has been a big help to me in using AI is to feed it the PDF
and very rarely does it spit out the perfect sales description, but very often it suggests ideas that I would not necessarily come up with on my own. And I also imagine that if you’re asking an AI. For that kind of public facing content. Then hopefully it’s producing something that it itself as an ai, like you’re AI optimizing by using the ai, if you
[00:21:06] Jeniffer: Yes, yes. Right. I totally agree with that. I’m really encouraging people to lean into ai. I mean, I agree wholeheartedly that that doesn’t mean you’re going to use what they gave you. But yeah, there’s things like, oh, I didn’t think of that. Or You don’t realize that we repeat ourselves a lot, you know, and our copy will say the same thing three times and we don’t even realize it.
Although AI tends to do that too, it tends to rephrase. So, you know, you have to be careful, but. My God, it’s such a si a time saver, and especially for people who really have a hard time with this type of, you know, creating content marketing copy is one of the hardest things you can write. You can write a 500 page book, but to write the marketing copy in three paragraphs, oh my God.
[00:21:49] Matty: It’s, yeah, it’s a totally different skillset
[00:21:51] Jeniffer: yeah,
[00:21:52] Matty: and in my, for my fiction, one of the things I found AI especially helpful for is to identify tropes that I should call out my sales descriptions on the retail sites. Like perfect for people who love stories, who found families and women on the run or whatever it is, because like you’re too close to it.
You don’t see that kind of thing. You’re like, oh yeah, yeah, it does
[00:22:09] Jeniffer: Oh.
[00:22:10] Matty: tropes. Yeah. Now that you mention it.
[00:22:12] Jeniffer: That is true. Yeah, I agree. I think it’s, I think it’s awesome. And looking for comparable titles, you know, trying to identify your audience. I mean, there’s so many tools you can use and then take space from it, come back to it and look at it again when you’ve had a little bit of space to make sure it’s resonating.
We want to be careful we don’t get lazy and just accept whatever AI gives
[00:22:32] Matty: Yeah.
[00:22:34] Jeniffer: But it’s a great tool. I agree.
[00:22:36] Matty: I have had the experience, I am getting near the end of a novel and I’ve been feeding it into Claude and saying, please give me a dev edit in a sense of like a continuity check and things like that. Do a copy edit and do a proofread. I do those as three separate steps and, I mean, it’s pretty bulletproof on the copy edit and
it’s very good at finding those things. And in the dev ed, input, it’s either. It’s either like freakishly good or freakishly bad. Like it’s sort of heartening because I think like this is evidence that it’s really not good enough to write an interesting book yet. but like, and it’s kind of 50 50, it’ll come back with something you’re like, oh yeah, like for me,
what I find it’s very helpful for is I tend to assume the reader is
More than I should. And I can hear my human editor speaking when Claude says to me, you know, you can be a little more upfront about this. And then sometimes it just comes up with things. I’m like, dude, where are you coming? What kind of book are you like commenting on? and I do, it
Like every time I reject something it suggests I’m like, ah, human
[00:23:43] Jeniffer: We’re still needed.
[00:23:46] Matty: we’re still needed. Exactly. Yeah. It can’t
[00:23:54] Matty: There was another topic we wanted to talk about that kind of feels like author branding, but author platform. Like how do you distinguish author branding from author platform and how does SEO
[00:24:04] Jeniffer: And I think the author platform is really evolving. I mean, I still hear agents say all the time, if you want to get an agent and you’re unknown, you have to have. A social media following, you know, a significant following. And the way I always describe platform and tell me if you agree with this is do you already
Are you worth taking a chance on? Because we know you’ll be able to sell books to your existing audience, and that’s really what platform is credibility and audience and visibility. You know, people know you exist and they’re going to buy your book. So if you don’t have an author platform, you’re not going to get an agent.
It’s just not going to happen. Now, author branding, everyone needs an author brand. Right. And an author brand by default is a platform because we are building an audience and we are building your platform. But I’m going to say this too, which is probably not popular. I don’t think you have to do everything. I don’t think you have to be on social
I, I mean, I’ve been teaching at writer’s conferences since the. Early two thousands and every conference there’s someone on the stage. So you know, talking about the latest and greatest thing, if you’re not on Facebook, you’re not going to sell books. If you don’t have a blog, you won’t sell books. And I’m like, you know what?
You don’t have to do anything these days. There are so many choices. So the first thing we look at is budget. What’s your budget? How much money do you have? How much time do you have? And what is your emotional bandwidth? Because if you go beyond your emotional bandwidth, that’s not sustainable and you’re not going to be able to actually do any good with your social media, right?
So it has to feel. Exciting to you. It has to be sustainable to you in order for it to really build a platform. There’s just so much noise out there, so, you know, how do we figure out what makes sense for you in an
[00:25:55] Jeniffer: And, you know, my author branding is unique to me, so I can’t speak to other people and how they brand authors, but
What makes you special? Who is your audience? Where are they? What are they looking for? And who are the people who are influencing that audience? If we can identify those influencers, then we know where you need to be and what stages you need to be on, where you need to be writing and getting published or speaking, or social media accounts, and then what kind of, you know, what kind of engagement are these
So we might have someone who’s all over the place, but no one’s talking. Right. No one’s engaging with that content. Well, you don’t have to be there, obviously. It’s not even working for this person who already has the attention of your reader. So we put together a plan
And I always say that the three pillars of book marketing success is audience, content, and loyalty. Figure out who your audience is, create content that they’re looking for, so they remain loyal. and that to me is author branding. So it’s a little bit of author platform, it’s a
You know, it’s a little bit of visibility.
[00:27:00] Jeniffer: It’s all of those things that work for you that are sustainable for you and bring you joy. Because we sit down to write a book because we love writing, and then somehow we wr all the joy out of it by telling ourselves, oh, I have to do all of these things, or
And, you know, it’s a long tail journey. And the authors I have who can like, relax about it and just do a little bit every day, two years later, they come back to me and they’re like, you were right. I’m still selling books. I’m doing a little bit every time I’m building my audience, you know, my second book sold more.
And, you know, and that’s really what it is. it’s a long tail journey,
[00:27:42] Matty: Well, another way I could think that AI. Changing, author platforms is, I had mentioned this on a recent episode that I’m somebody who could spend a certain amount of time in the evening over a cocktail, scrolling through Facebook, but I’m doing it
That’s AI generated. On my feed, the less interesting I find it. you know, at the example I use is, I like the cute puppy video as much as the next person. But if it’s a fake puppy, I’m not as interested. And so I’m spending more time there. I’m spending, I mean, I’m spending less time there. I’m spending more time on platforms like Substack. but I’m only, it’s very different. Like the interaction is very different because I’m not just scrolling past things. I’m looking at articles and I’m reading like the subheads, like you’re saying. I’m probably scanning through the subs head, seeing if this is something I want to
And it almost feels like an a concentration of the, thousand true fans idea that, that AI feels like it’s supporting the tho thousand true fans. Concept because I am, you know, if I go to AI and ask it a question, it never points me to a TikTok video. It always points me to an article or, you know, more thoughtful content and more extensive
And so maybe it actually points toward people being incentivized by the technology to spend more time with the content, with the recognition that if it’s longer content, then. You’re not going to have, it’s harder to get to, it’s harder to get a follower on something, on substack where you’re writing a thousand words every week or something like that than it is to get a follower on Facebook where all you have to do is put
[00:29:30] Jeniffer: Sure. Sure. Yeah.
[00:29:33] Matty: so I think that could be heartening for people who love the writing, but don’t love the, you know, aren’t interested in making TikTok videos. Maybe that’s a heartening part about platform
[00:29:44] Jeniffer: I think it is, and I think there’s so many options that, you know, you find, you lean into the thing that works for you. I mean, I literally just had a call with an author client before this, and she hates creating videos and she hates being on panels, but she loves writing articles, so we’re putting her on substack.
She’s writing for Psychology today, and so she’s. She is a thoughtful, long form person. I’m guessing that her audience also enjoys thoughtful, long form content, right? So we really are our best reader and our best client and best audience. And I’ve heard marketers say before, you are not your client, or you are not your reader, your
I totally disagree with that because we write what we love and we write what we know and we write what we’re interested in. Or we write a book because we needed that book and it wasn’t available. So, you know, if you just think about what you are interested in, maybe follow that.
[00:30:44] Jeniffer: You know, I do want to say one thing though, that I think is really important for branding and gaining visibility.
This idea of stepping past the threshold of your comfort zone. You know, sometimes we’re. We’re sort of afraid to do things because we think, oh, I could never do that. I could never create a TikTok video. I could never talk on a stage. I, you know, it seems so terrifying and more times than I can count. I’ve had an author who said, Nope, I would
I encourage them to, because I had a feeling they’d be really good at it. You know, just stepping just past the threshold of your comfort zone is magic. That’s where you find the magic. And I speak from experience because I’m a rock climber who’s terrified of heights. So how did this happen? Much longer story that we won’t go over today, but if you push yourself past that threshold, you find something that might be that space where the most magic happens and the most joy happens, and things
I mean, this is just human nature. So if you think I could never be on TikTok, maybe try it and see what happens. You might love it. You never want to be on a podcast. Maybe try it, you know, like I had this author who, she was amazing. She was actually on a morning radio show and the, there was two guys, I think it was in Utah.
They had so many people calling in. She was hysterical, she was a ham, she was great. And they’re like, we want you to come back. And I was like, I told you. And then she started a podcast and you know, she found that place of magic for herself because she leaned into that discomfort
Okay. Not that much, but just all, yeah.
[00:32:24] Matty: It feels like there’s a distinction somehow of. Nervousness about something as opposed to aversion to something because, I mean, TikTok is the perfect example for me. When it first came out, I went on as a consumer for like 30 seconds and I was like, this is awful. Like why would, like, I’m never going to spend time on this as a consumer, so I’m never going to even bother trying to be a producer of
Um. I love, I love YouTube. Like YouTube is another platform where I could spend hours over a cocktail in the evening. And so I’ve leaned into YouTube and not that I feel comfortable about it, but it’s, it’s pushing the boundaries as opposed to, I don’t know. I wish I could come up with a good analogy, you know, stepping into what, what feels like a, you know, a stream full of crocodiles as opposed to making your way
But I agree, there’s, it’s important to think through, am I avoiding this because I’m nervous about. How well I’m going to do versus is just
[00:33:24] Jeniffer: Yeah, absolutely. And you do have to listen to your heart, you know, follow your heart. I always say follow the joy, because we don’t want our baby, you know, your book is your baby. We
[00:33:36] Matty: Yeah.
[00:33:37] Jeniffer: And that can happen very easily if we’re doing too many things that are outside that sustainable emotional
Not to mention time and money, which are very important, and we have so
[00:33:50] Matty: And hopefully more reliance on AI search as opposed to people just going to a social media platform and looking for new content or scrolling through kind of mindlessly scrolling through new content. Maybe that’s paving the way to more meaningful connections, maybe with a smaller group of people.
But, Providing a way for authors to use content that they enjoy creating, like long form articles or, you know, maybe they’re a photographer and they like to represent what they’re doing through their photography or whatever that might be, the rock climbers. And so they want to like find a way to combine, their rock climbing love with whatever they’re writing books about or something like that.
Maybe that will pave the way to that becoming more discoverable than it
[00:34:32] Jeniffer: absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:34:43] Jeniffer: And I think, you know, you said something earlier that really resonated with me, which is, we all want to look at puppies, but we don’t want to see the AI puppy. Yeah, and I think we need to trust our fellow humans that we really do need and appreciate and
It can help us. It can certainly help us parse through, like you said, you know. in your books. I mean, that’s a wonderful way to use it. But at the end of the day, you’re going to write your book because only you can write it with your voice. And I think things are going to go in a good
I have hope for AI and how it’s going to help us as authors.
[00:35:14] Matty: I mean, the idea of just having AI write your book to me is ab boring, right? Like, that’s awful. But to have AI help you put all of your thoughts together and organize your chapters, To think of things that you hadn’t thought of, I think is incredibly helpful. And those people who don’t lean into that tool are going to
[00:35:32] Jeniffer: I mean, that’s just a reality. There’s just not enough time in the day to keep up if you’re not using the tools available to you. And I do trust readers. I do trust that they can see
[00:35:44] Jeniffer: And you know, this whole phenomenon that’s happening right now with book clubs, reaching out to authors saying.
Your book was amazing and it resonated with me. And then like literally pulling the content from your description and your website and spitting it back to you and then saying, we want to have you on our book club and it has all these people, and you only have to pay me \$400, you know, and the same author I was talking to this morning, I, she sends them to
Is this one real? Is this one real? I’m like, none of them, they’re real. No. Book clubs are not doing this. You know, hashtag group is not reaching out to authors of other publishers to put ’em on their book group. And, but it’s like, so we’re in this sticky space where. AI is so flattering and the sentences are so perfect that for me, it’s so easy to spot, right?
Just like I can spot a self-published cover, I can spot AI and I think everyone is going to get there. we’re all, because it’s the uncanny valley, something’s just not right. I can feel it. I might not be able to name it intellectually, but I can feel it, and I trust that.
[00:36:51] Matty: Yeah, I seize any opportunity I can to say this, that if you get an email from Gmail, if it is very complimentary and if there’s no way to contact the sender other than replying to the email, in other words, no website to go research them. No. Like, nothing like that. Nothing connecting out into the real world, just delete it.
because yeah, the, yeah, the advice that I give now is. I feel as someone who has been in a business where I’m basically cold emailing people I don’t even bother anymore. And I say, don’t. Don’t accept any cold call approaches. If you need a marketing service, go look for a
Don’t even pay attention to what’s coming into your inbox.
The one thing I found and, but you have to do this, having already committed that you’re not going to respond is some of those emails have
[00:37:47] Jeniffer: Oh my gosh. That’s
[00:37:48] Matty: got one for one of
[00:37:49] Jeniffer: You’re like, oh,
[00:37:50] Matty: I’m like, I am keeping this because they have a
I’m never going to get in touch with them. But it was educational to read it. Yeah. But, but commit. Commit ahead of time. Never respond if it’s
[00:38:04] Jeniffer: Yeah,
[00:38:04] Matty: I think that’s actually a good branding tip too though, because I think that in the past, authors may, might have used their Gmail account or whatever for their professional outreach.
No, you, you really need to be using,a branded domain, of your website for your email outreach. Otherwise, it’s, people are just still.
[00:38:22] Jeniffer: Email has become such a sticky widget because it’s become very expensive to have professional email. I mean, it used to just be free with your domain and your hosting, and that’s no longer the case. You know, GoDaddy and most hosting companies are charging like \$250 for an email. It’s becoming very expensive to be an author and be
Which is why a lot of people use a regular Gmail account, but it’s a very good point. You know, having that branded professionalism shows the world that you take yourself seriously enough to invest in it.
Yeah. And even if you don’t, like, if you’re just starting out and you don’t have a website yet, but you want to start building an email list, I think it’s still better to, so I recently moved from my old email service to email Octopus Oh, I haven’t heard of this one.
[00:39:13] Matty: yeah, it’s great. It’s \$9 a month. It. It has
I actually moved away from Aweber, which is what I was on, because it was very good. but it was clearly moving toward like more and more functionality way beyond what I needed, but I was paying for it. so I wanted something really basic. So \$9 a month you can get on email octopus and at least your emails are coming from email octopus.
[00:39:38] Jeniffer: Um,
[00:39:42] Matty: I want to jump as maybe sort of a final topic from, two of the key assets that every writer should have, email list and headshots. So, talk a little bit about is there overlap here between
[00:39:55] Jeniffer: Well, a hundred percent. I think we, we talked about that too. You know, if you’re naming your jpeg with your name and maybe even a keyword in there for me, it’s author publishing. I stick in there, Jeniffer Thompson, author publishing, separating the words with an underscore because that tells the code that those are
You’re going to be more discoverable. That’s just going to help you come up in search engines for image searches. And a lot of people do image searches nowadays, so, absolutely. And headshots. I like to think of headshots as the same way you would a birthday. So every year get a
We get older every single year. So it doesn’t matter if I tell myself I’m going to wait till I lose 10 pounds and then I wait, and then I’ve gained 10 pounds and I still need a headshot, and I’m like, why didn’t I take it 10 pounds ago? So, you know, if you just take a headshot. Every single year, you get in the habit of having your photograph taken,
And number two, three years. You later you might be like, oh my God, look how adorable I was three years ago. I’m going to use that headshot, and you’ll always have fresh headshots as opposed to having a headshot you took 20 years ago. Not professional, not as searchable. You know,
It’s also just good for your brand. You know, and it’s exciting to put up a new photo of yourself. So find someone who you trust, a professional, hopefully with good lighting, lighting makes all the difference in the world. And do not use AI headshots where you take a picture of you drinking a cocktail with your friends at the beach, you’re in a bikini, and then they put you in a business suit and change
[00:41:38] Matty: Like you’re holding a blackberry or something?
[00:41:40] Jeniffer: talk about uncanny valley. I mean, they’re terrible. So, you know, I mean, lean into your. Business and get a headshot. And if you hate it, guess what? You don’t have to use it. But two years from now, you might really love it. , because we’re only
We’re only going to be as cute as we are today. Right. then yes, of course, you know, the, maybe there’s some transformations that happen, but it’s just a really good habit. To get into and it’s good to have to show you with people to signing books at events. You know, if you’re on social media, having more images of yourself doing the thing you love, it can be really, really helpful for building that brand
[00:42:21] Matty: Yeah. One of the things that I always find very disconcerting is going to a reader author event and seeing someone that I’ve only seen in their, like in their photo, and it was clearly taken like 30 years ago. Here’s the tip. Everybody on LinkedIn just update your profile pictures, their profile pic.
There are people that I’ve been connected with on LinkedIn for 30 years and their profile picture is still the same. Stop that. Um, the other
[00:42:47] Jeniffer: that’s a spreadsheet that you were talking about. Yeah. Not just update your bio, but update your headshot.
[00:42:54] Matty: My tip, I have a presentation I give called Publishing Tips for Frugal Authors and one of them is Frugal Headshots. And I, earlier this year I went, I had just gotten my hair cut much shorter and I was going on a cruise and they’re always those people
I ended up getting, Two new headshots. One for my fiction platform, one for my nonfiction platform for 30 bucks. and they look very professional , because the people have professional equipment. They know how to like position you and you know, not have palm trees in the background. If you don’t want that kind of look, but,
[00:43:24] Jeniffer: So you could spend \$1,200 to get your headshot taken, or you could spend \$1,200 and just go on a cruise and
[00:43:32] Matty: and write it off because it’s a business
[00:43:35] Jeniffer: exactly.
[00:43:36] Matty: I’m, please
[00:43:37] Jeniffer: I don’t know. I,
[00:43:38] Matty: tell your tax preparer that it came from
[00:43:41] Jeniffer: Matty told me I could. Yeah.
[00:43:43] Matty: Well, and I think maybe to bring it back around to the idea of AI and tapping into AI for all the things it’s good for, but not tapping into it for the things it’s bad for is this idea that anything that you’re doing that’s distancing you from the people who want to get to know you. like having a really old headshot or like having a clearly AI generated headshot or something like that.
Those are just the things that we want to steer away from to lean into our
[00:44:10] Jeniffer: Absolutely. I love that. Lean into your
[00:44:15] Matty: Yeah. That’s probably the best, the best brand. We should get a t-shirt made that says, lean into human, your humanity
[00:44:24] Jeniffer: I love it. I think that’s a great idea. I’ll go in on that with you. We can start selling them at our next
[00:44:28] Matty: Yes. Yeah, it’s perfect. When we go back to between the pages, we’ll be armed with merchandise.
[00:44:33] Jeniffer: There you go. Yeah.
[00:44:34] Matty: Well, Jennifer, it’s been so fun to talk to you and, please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about
[00:44:40] Jeniffer: Okay. Well, thank you so much, Matty. This has been such a wonderful conversation. People can learn more about me@JenifferThompson.com and they can learn about my company and our website and book cover design services at MonkeyCMedia.com, and we can put those in the bio or whatever. If you need me to send you those links.
I do have some. Some tools on JenifferThompson.com, lots of author marketing tips if people want to subscribe to my newsletter. And I’m getting ready to start really releasing some of these things we talked about as classes, you know, free classes and you know, just little tips that authors can use when they’re building their brand and developing their book launch plan, putting together their street team and doing all
So hopefully everyone has gotten something out of this , because I’ve had
[00:45:30] Matty: Oh, sure. I have a lovely time too. Thank you.